Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the decision of the Obama administration not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act:
President Obama does not want to defend marriage anymore. He never really did, and here’s the proof: 15 years ago this month, while running for the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama said, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriage, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”
But when Obama decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he knew that his support for homosexuals crashing the institution of marriage was too extreme, so he decided to endorse civil unions. He said at the time, “I think that marriage, in the minds of a lot of voters, has a religious connotation.”
In 2008, when Obama was a presidential candidate, he invoked God-talk again to justify his newly crafted defense of marriage: “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian…it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” But he knew this wasn’t true when he said it, and here’s the proof: at the same time Obama was rhetorically espousing a pro-marriage position, he was working to undermine marriage by opposing Proposition 8 in California. That was the 2008 measure that reserved marriage as a union between the only two people who can naturally form a family, namely, a man and a woman.
Now Obama is officially on record as president opposing the defense of marriage. Thus does he pit himself against the 1996 law that was signed by President Bill Clinton, and opposed by only 15 percent in the House and 14 percent in the Senate. He also stands in opposition to the over 30 state initiatives affirming marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Now that Obama is totally out of the closet, it will spur a genuine effort to adopt a constitutional amendment affirming the integrity of marriage.
